It is hard to believe that we are already two months down in the year.

February was another good month. I kept on with the writing every day, plus managed a couple of other things.

Word count was 52335 of drafts and 40437 of rewrites, for a total of 92682 of for the month.

I slowed down on the rough drafts towards the end of the month to concentrate mostly on the rewrites.

Unlike January, I mostly focused on just a few projects. I finished off the rough draft of the first novella of the space opera series I started on before shifting over to the epic fantasy novel, which is up to almost 37,000 words. For the rewrites, I was working entirely on the nano novel from last year. My plan is to get it done and then polish it up ready to get out there. It is 40,000 words in now and going strong. At my current rate, it should be done in about a week.

In addition to that I also put out the first four of the short fiction pieces, getting over my self doubts. Three are from The Chronicles of White Bull and the fourth from The Deeds of Peregrine and Blade. More will follow in the coming weeks and months as I get the novels ready. I’ll update on that in a later post.

I’ve been reading webcomics for quite a while now – some I’ve stuck with, others, due to time constraints I’ve let drop. I’m a big fan of them and how they go about telling there stories. Now if only I could draw…

But I can’t, so I write.

Webcomics, for the most, sell there stories differently than authors. They give it away for free upfront. You go to the webcomic and there it is, available to read. And yet, even doing so, some authors of webcomics earn a living. They do this by building up a fanbase through there works who then buy copies of the book, the merchandise, sponsor them like old fashioned patrons etc.

Authors tend not to work that way, at least not for those who write full length novels. For those that write short fiction and serials there are some who do so.

It is something that I am starting to try out now. I have started a new blog, Tales From a Thousand Worlds, where three times a week I’ll post my short stories in small parts of about 1000 words at a time, give or take. It is both an experiment and an effort to hopefully begin building up a collection of people who enjoy reading my stories, and do so on a regular basis.

It has been a while since I have last updated what has been going on writing wise. Probably about time I did.

I have today just finished off the rewrite of a brand new short story, in the Peregrine and Blade series. It comes in at around 11,000 words and is titled The Oasis of Broken Bones. The series has been the main focus of my writing as of late. There are currently 16 stories completed in that series, ranging from 2000 to 25000 words in length. Between them they number some 166000 words, which is a fair amount. Only seven of those have ever been seen so far. In addition, 8 more are in various stages of planning. All of them will be coming to light soon I hope.

In addition, there are some 24 other short stories and novellas in other collections gathering dust, with a number more planned.

More news on what is going to happen to them all should happen soon. At least that is the plan.

The string of not quite meeting the challenge targets has continued this week, aided by having three days of relief work that saw little done on those days. Plus today I have a job interview to see whether it becomes a more permanent arrangement. I have also temporarily paused writing up notes on the background on the fantasy epic series while I do research on a number of matters; language, mythology, cultures, history etc, looking for ideas and inspiration.

We have now completed the second month of the year so it is time to look back over the progress of it.

I did not have quite as much time to write this month, given I was doing relief work for two days a week during it, and as a result the output did drop a bit. Compared to the 120,000 from last month, this month was only 81,458 in comparison.

Of that 13818 words were written on the background notes for the new epic fantasy under design. I had been aiming for 14,000 so fell just short.

24812 went into drafts of new stories, a bit short of the 28,000 I had been aiming for.

42,828 was of rewrites of old drafts and stories, slightly above the 42,000 I had set for the month.

There are now 1 novella, 11 novelettes and 2 short stories complete, an addition of 5 novelettes from last month, still all from the same three series.

Obviously the proofread, edit and covers didn’t get done last month. No promises for this month either…

The last week I didn’t get as much done as I should have. Occasionally these things happen, which is why I went hard at the beginning to bank extra words, so to speak, to cover such periods. But I picked up in the last couple of days, finishing off one rewrite (the thirteenth) and a new rough draft of over 16,000 words. By the time the rewrite is done it will probably be closer to 20,000.